Usually dance is used to express oneself and convey emotions. Therefore, it can evoke a state of mind and body that is very different from the everyday experience, because the dancer does not usually perform such movements every day. Dance requires unaccustomed patterns of muscle tension and relaxation, and an unusually intense or sustained expenditure of energy. At the same time, dance creates very different perceptions of time and space for any dancer: time is “felt” through the rhythmic ordering of movement and duration of dance, and the surrounding space is organized around the dancer’s poses and movements.

Dance can actually create a completely autonomous world for dancers, in which their physical effort and endurance can go far beyond the ordinary. For example, Sufi dervishes can spin around in ecstasy for very long periods of time without the appearance of fatigue or dizziness, and some Indonesian dancers can beat themselves with daggers in the bare chest without causing obvious pain or injury.

These everyday examples can even be experienced by spectators. Involved in the rhythms and patterns created by the dancer’s movements, they can begin to experience the emotions expressed through dance themselves. They may also experience kinesthetically something similar to the dancer’s physical sensations. Kinesthesia, or body awareness through movement rather than visual awareness, not only defines the dancer’s comprehension of his or her body through movement, but is also the way in which dance manifests its power over the audience, who not only see but also feel echoes of the dancer’s movements and rhythms in their own nerve endings.

Functions of Dance
Modern military marches can be seen as descendants of tribal war dances and dances dedicated to hunting, which were also an integral part of many cultures. Military dances, which often used weapons and martial movements, have been used throughout history as a way to train soldiers and prepare them emotionally and spiritually for battle. Many hunting tribes performed dances in which hunters dressed in animal skins imitated the movements of their prey, “thereby acquiring the skills of the animal through sympathetic magic and gaining power over it.”

Dance also plays a number of important social roles in all cultures, particularly in matters of celebration, courtship, recreation, and entertainment. Mating dances, for example, allow dancers to show their strength and attractiveness and to engage in socially acceptable physical contact between the sexes. For example, the waltz, which is a relatively modern example of mating dance, was forbidden at a certain time because its blatantly close contact between dancers was considered indecent.

The importance of dance in courtship and social events is probably older than its use as recreation and entertainment.